Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Walkin' to the south out of RoanokeI caught a trucker out of Philly had a nice long tokeBut he's a-heading west from the Cumberland gapTo Johnson City, TennesseeI gotta get a move on before the sunI hear my baby calling my name and I know that she's the only oneAnd if I die in Raleigh at least I will die free

“Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.”

Thursday, October 23, 2014

I made this for a print exchange: [Baren] Exchange #62. The image is 4" x 4" and the paper is 6" x 6". It is printed in white, oil-based ink on black, Stonehenge paper. So far I made 2 editions, one of 30 for the exchange, and one of 4. All printed by hand with my trusty wooden spoon. So I'll be wearing my hand brace tonight.

I'm really stuck on making prints of ammonites lately. I keep going over it in my mind, and I've decided that there are three main reasons why ammonites are captivating my interests at the moment:

1. They are extinct. They died out during the same mass extinction as the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But obviously they aren't nearly as famous as the dinosaurs. Nonetheless, they were this whole category of animals that were incredibly plentiful and prolific, and they were wiped out. They were something beautiful and unique and very much alive, and now they are nothing more than impressions of shells. We don't even know what the soft parts of their bodies really looked like, and probably never will. Such a thing seems worth exploring, noting, and sharing with an audience.

2. When I look at fossils mainly found in museum collections, they are often fragments or pieces, and also often have scratch marks on or around them. I think about all the painstaking work scientists in the field have to do, carefully digging and then scratching around fossil in order to expose these precious pieces of the past. And it reminds me of what I do with my wood blocks; how I carefully carve out the impression of an image I have drawn, while deciding how much to let the knots and wood grain influence the final impression.

3. Ammonites are in a spiral shape, which is just, plain awesome. So many plants, animals, and other things found in nature, from spider webs to whole galaxies form spiral patterns. Spirals are both mathematical and lyrical. Bruce Nauman had the right idea.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Twelth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, burlap, lace, chipboard, and string. “What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.” “Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.” Both quotes from Virginia Woolf

Eleventh in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, burlap, chipboard, bubble wrap, and string. "The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?" -Joyce Carol Oates

Tenth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, chipboard, and string. "The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed--it is a process of elimination." -Elbert Hubbard

Sixth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, chipboard, and string.

"Some think love can be measured by the amount of butterflies in their tummy. Others think love can be measured in bunches of flowers, or by using the words 'for ever.' But love can only truly be measured by actions. It can be a small thing, such as peeling an orange for a person you love because you know they don't like doing it." -Marian Keyes

Fifth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, chipboard, burlap, and string.

"The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind, and they are in continual danger of breaking the skin and bursting out again." -Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Monday, October 6, 2014

Image posted with the permission of the artist. More linocuts by Edwards can be found at his website, The Black Gold Press.The young man in this image is not smiling (his face is serious, even skull-like.) But I am. I know it's done from an old photo taken to show off, in terms of human scale, the tremendous size of this ammonite fossil. But the background print makes me think of old-fashioned wallpaper, and instantly I associate this image with a high school band geek in uniform being compelled (probably by his mother) to stand beside his sousaphone for a nice, family album photo.And really, in the grand scheme of things, what is the difference between a bored teenager's sousaphone and the fossilized husk of a creature that went extinct millions of years before humans were even a whisper on the breeze of the African savanna?

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Image posted with the permission of the artist. I first wrote about Henry's work in 2012. Check out her website to see more of her work, including an amazing wheat paste installation. It is a grey and rainy day, and I need some seasonal color. In the words of Albert Camus that have stayed with me, "Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower." She jumps for joy, I know not why. But I suppose it is either pride over the accomplishment of amassing such an enormous heap of leaves, or the youthful exuberance enjoyed as one leaps into such a pile. The soles of her shoes are camouflaged against the scratched earth. Footless, she flies.

Third in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, chipboard, and string. The Nautilus and the Ammonite

The nautilus and the ammoniteWere launched in friendly strife,Each sent to float in its tiny boatOn the wide, wide sea of life.

For each could swim on the ocean's brim,And, when wearied, its sail could furl,And sink to sleep in the great sea-deep,In its palace all of pearl.

And theirs was a bliss more fair than thisWhich we taste in our colder clime;For they were rife in a tropic life—A brighter and better clime.

They swam 'mid isles whose summer smilesWere dimmed by no alloy;Whose groves were palm, whose air was balm,And life one only joy.

They sailed all day through creek and bay,And traversed the ocean deep;

And at night they sank on a coral bank,In its fairy bowers to sleep.

And the monsters vast of ages pastThey beheld in their ocean caves;They saw them ride in their power and pride,And sink in their deep-sea graves.

And hand in hand, from strand to strand,They sailed in mirth and glee;These fairy shells, with their crystal cells,Twin sisters of the sea.

And they came at last to a sea long past,But as they reached its shore,The Almighty's breath spoke out in death,And the ammonite was no more.So the nautilus now in its shelly prow,As over the deep it strays,Still seems to seek, in bay and creek,Its companion of other days.

And alike do we, on life's stormy sea,As we roam from shore to shore,Thus tempest-tossed, seek the loved, the lost,And find them on earth no more.

Yet the hope how sweet, again to meet,As we look to a distant strand,Where heart meets heart, and no more they partWho meet in that better land.

Second in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, chipboard, string and burlap.

Frank Lloyd Wright's inverted oatmeal dish and silo with their awkward cantilevering, their jaundiced skin and the ingenious spiral ramp leading down past the abstractions which mirror the tortured maladjustments of our time. -Robert Moses

New series, spirals and dead things, not sure where this is going yet. This is a collograph made with cardboard, chipboard, and string. Hard to photograph and get the colors right. The paper (the light parts) is actually blue, and the ink was a very dark purple, almost black.

Ammonites are perhaps the most widely known fossil, possessing the typically ribbed spiral-form shell as pictured above. These creatures lived in the seas between 240 - 65 million years ago, when they became extinct along with the dinosaurs. The name 'ammonite' (usually lower-case) originates from the Greek Ram-horned god called Ammon. Ammonites belong to a group of predators known as cephalopods, which includes their living relatives the octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus -Discovering Fossils

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Last week I had the good fortune to see Passages, a retrospective of works by Modernist printmaker Robert Blackburn at the David C. Driskell Center in Maryland. It is on view through December 19. Anyone near that area interested in printmaking, Modern art, or African American art history should definitely check it out. If you can't get there, you can view all the work online here (although the Driskell Center puts a horribly large and distracting watermark across all those images), or you can purchase the show catalog here.

To my delight, the exhibit included 25 woodcuts! Almost all were made in the 1960's-70's. All are abstractions, mostly color, and many using the grain and imperfections in the block's surface or edges to add texture. I had some difficulty deciding which to highlight on this blog post. I decided on these two works, Yellow Flash and Blue Things, because I think they both read well on a computer screen, and I find them both particularly exciting. In person they are also of considerable size for woodcuts: 20" x 26" and 26" x 20".

Although it is easy to see representational imagery in many of these works, it is probably not the artist's intention, given the period and tradition in which Blackburn worked. This is further indicated by the fact that he frequently changed the orientation of his works. For instance, the version of Blue Things exhibited was oriented and signed on the bottom as it is presented here, but I have also found it upsidedown, and signed so as to indicate that orientation.

Enough of my excessive blathering on.

Yellow Flash

The sea, quartered by fire.
No hand of Zeus, but
More than a lightening bolt.